From near-death to 'angel': angelo de augustine's remarkable return
Angelo De Augustine, the acclaimed singer-songwriter known for his collaborations with Sufjan Stevens, faced a terrifying medical ordeal that left him contemplating mortality. Now, he’s back with a profoundly moving album, Angel in Plainclothes, born from the ashes of a near-fatal collapse and a journey of painstaking recovery.
A halloween nightmare and a doctor's stark warning
The story began on Halloween 2022, when De Augustine, 33, suddenly collapsed at his Los Angeles home. As he recounts, “I got all these strange sensations and knew something was very wrong. Then I lost control of my body.” His family’s swift action got him to a hospital, where he endured a battery of tests. He remained conscious throughout, a grim detail he wryly notes, adding, “I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see well, and I couldn’t really move.” Astonishingly, after a period of uncertainty, doctors offered a chilling prognosis: “Come back if you go completely deaf or blind.”
Faced with such a bleak outlook, De Augustine’s primary focus became completing Toil and Trouble, an album he’d been meticulously crafting. “Nobody was helping,” he admits, “and I didn’t think I would survive the illness. I just wanted to get it finished, then thought I was probably gonna die.” It was a testament to his artistic drive, pushing through a debilitating condition to fulfill a creative commitment, a drive that ultimately fueled his recovery.
Relearning life, one note at a time
The intervening years have been a process of arduous rehabilitation. De Augustine has had to relearn fundamental skills – walking, talking, hearing, playing, and singing. This experience, he says, has indelibly shaped his new Music. Angel in Plainclothes is, in essence, a meditation on life’s fragility, echoing the wistful beauty of Nick Drake and early Paul Simon. The single, “Mirror Mirror,” explores the disorienting sensation of feeling like a ghost, observing life from a detached perspective.
What triggered this profound physiological breakdown remains somewhat enigmatic. Emerging research, as De Augustine explains, points towards the body’s response to prolonged stress—specifically, exceeding the “allostatic load,” the nervous system’s capacity for self-regulation. “Sometimes,” he clarifies, “when somebody is under a great deal of chronic fear and stress for a very long time they can go past that point. The brain tries to protect itself, so it sends all these strange symptoms to your body.” The pressures of the Music industry, he concedes, likely played a role, though he insists it's a world he feels intrinsically drawn to.
His recovery involved a return to his mother’s home, where he was unable to perform even basic tasks. A turning point was discovering the therapeutic effects of water, a realization that prompted a dedicated regimen of physical and mental exercises. “It taught me to retrain the parts of my brain where wires had become crossed,” he says. The journey was marked by setbacks—periods of improvement followed by regressions—but slowly, painstakingly, he began to rebuild his life and his craft.
A soundscape of antiquity and resilience
Angel in Plainclothes isn’t just a testament to De Augustine's resilience; it’s also a sonic exploration of the unexpected. Beyond his voice and songwriting, the album incorporates a strikingly eclectic collection of antique instruments: a bowed psaltery, an aquarion, a Marxophone, a bass recorder, even a 1990s synthesiser version of a Japanese koto harp. He’s currently hunting for a civil war-era pump organ, envisioning it as a portable centerpiece for future compositions. “You can carry it in a suitcase,” he enthuses.
After a five-year hiatus from live performance, De Augustine recently took to the stage, a moment he describes as both challenging and deeply rewarding. “There were some difficult moments, but getting through that just felt amazing.” He’s now navigating a new chapter, one where he prioritizes living a full life over solely pursuing artistic perfection. “For so long, my only focus was trying to be a great songwriter, and perhaps I paid the price for that. Now I’d rather not have tried so hard. I just want to live a good life.”